A blog about running
that has metamorphosed
into one about life in general.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

An Unfortunate Sexual Incident At Work

I have three fears in this Psych
Unit business that I’m in and I’ve touched on this in a post a few months ago:
first, death of a patient by suicide, second - sexual behavior between
patients, and third - being out of a job. That is why I walk a straight and
narrow path and have always remained as vigilant as possible in the 30 plus
years I've worked in my position as a mental health worker. I have never
relaxed and that's the reason why I don't do overtime work - because working
just two days in a row, I give 100 percent all that time. However, in my
opinion, you can’t catch them all because things can happen in an instant with
just a brief turn of the head or being in a partially blind corner. As much as
we attempt to be omnipresent, which is an impossibility, we still miss things.
Case in point: on December 6th just before 7 a.m. I was assisting a
phlebotomist by escorting her to the patients’ room so she can draw blood and
give TB tests. Neither I nor my other coworkers noticed that a male patient had
slipped into another male patients’ room. See, we don’t allow patients to visit
in each other’s rooms even though they are of the same sex. Just before 7 o’clock,
I excused myself from the phlebotomist to do my second to the last rounds of
the day before the end of my shift. When I checked one particular patients’
room, I didn’t see him there, which was not unusual because they come and go
all the time. I proceeded to check on the other rooms that I was assigned to
and when I opened one of the rooms, I saw one male patient lying on his bed in
the knee-chest position while another male patient was facing him with his
genital area directly positioned towards the lying patients’ buttocks. If that
was too graphic for you, I apologize. Well, in a psych unit setting, sexual
behavior is a no-no, regardless of whether it’s heterosexual sex or gay sex.
All I could do was ask the male in the dominant position to get up and leave
the room. He arose and pulled his pants up and left the room while I asked
another staff member to call the charge nurse. To complicate matters, we were
aware that the dominant male was infected with something I shall not disclose. I
described what I saw to the charge nurse and she wrote a report about it.

This is the kind of patient
incident that can get someone fired because you may be blamed that you had not
done your job well for something like that to happen. I went home agonizing over
the incident even though I thought that I had done the best that I could in
checking on my assigned patients. I ruminated about how it could have been
prevented, so much so that I did not sleep well. Upon waking from my restless
sleep, I had three voice mails awaiting me, all saying to call my supervisor so
I could give my input on what happened. I composed an email explaining what
happened, sent it to my supervisors, then called them. Both calls went to
voicemail so I left a message telling them I sent them an email. While waiting
to return to work in the evening, I kept on checking my email for a response,
but didn’t get any.

If there is anything that would
probably support my telling of the event, it would be the omnipresent cameras
recording our every move on the unit. The video would show that I was indeed
with the phlebotomist and at the time I said I caught the two patients in the
act, I was also indeed doing my rounds then. I don’t know what else I can do to
prove that I was doing the job I was supposed to be doing. Regardless, I lament
that we were not able to prevent it from happening and assigning blame is
fruitless because it was a collective failure. I’m awaiting the fallout with
trepidation.

No comments:

Statcounter

About Me

I started writing this blog to chronicle my devastating running injury in October of 2008. It has since turned into something I didn't expect: stories and anecdotes about everyday life. On 7/26/11, I retitled this blog from noeldlp.blogspot.com to aboutlifeandrunning.blogspot.com. I remain permanently injured with PTTD on both ankles but I keep on trying to run nonetheless. I'm not sure if it's passion or insanity. You be the judge.